Next Steps: Putting the Governance Task Force Recommendations into Action - Part 1

Towards the end of last year, the Governance Task Force concluded their six-month process and developed a list of thirteen recommendations for evolving Drupal's governance. This followed almost a year of efforts that engaged many stakeholders in the community to share thoughts on Drupal's governance model. Those recommendations were published in a blog, promoted by Dries, and made available in individual issues for community feedback.

We want to thank everyone for their participation in this process.

In particular we'd like to thank David, Ela, Stella, Lyndsey, Rachel, Hussain, and Adam as the leaders of the Governance Task Force.

I would also like to thank the many other community members who have been highly engaged in this process from start to finish. More than a hundred community members  attended community governance roundtables—both virtually and in person—or participated in one-on-one interviews, from across the globe.

Still more members of our community shared their voices in the issue queues, chat rooms, or discussions on these and other blog updates.

Finally, I want to thank all of the existing community bodies who have been crucial in bringing Drupal to this point, and will continue to be a fundamental part of our evolving governance. Groups like the CWG, the Core Maintainer Team, DD&I, the mentorship and contribution team, and a number of others play a critical role in our governance.

It reflects the tremendous care that everyone involved has for this community and a strong commitment to ensuring that this project continues to be a leader, not just in open source technology but also in open source community governance.

The next step is to put those recommendations into action. The Drupal Association is only one part of the community, and only one stakeholder in this effort, but there are a number of things we feel we can do to help move these recommendations forward.

In accordance with our values and principles, when evaluating potential actions, our goal is to identify immediate feasibility and prioritize impact. A number of the task force's recommendations are topics we can tackle very quickly, whereas others, like ones that require fundraising, may have a longer time horizon. Understand, this is not a commentary on the *importance* of any individual recommendation, but rather on which items can be executed quickly and which will take a more extended effort.

Part 1 of this series will focus on the immediate next steps that the Drupal Association can take to help support these recommendations. Part 2 will address the recommendations that will be an ongoing effort over the medium and long term.

Immediate next steps

Grow the Community Working Group (CWG) to offer more support

There is already progress on the recommendation to "Grow the Community Working Group (CWG) to offer more support." Serendipitously, at the same time as the Governance Task Force recommendations were released, the Community Working Group submitted a proposal for a revised charter to Dries and the Drupal Association Board.

The revised charter included complementary changes in-line with the recommendations of the Governance Task Force. Perhaps most powerfully, the proposed changes included two key new elements:

1. The CWG would switch from reporting to Dries himself to a subcommittee of the Drupal Association Board that consists of a three-member review panel: the two community elected board members and a third person external to the community. This leverages expertise from another open source project and offers a different perspective outside of Drupal.
2. Providing support and resources for proactive initiatives to enable community health and support efforts. The CWG has long wanted to increase its ability to improve health and equity in our community and the DA can now support these activities.

This change also ensures that the Community Working Group has the appropriate legal and insurance support for its activities, clarifies the membership process, provides term limits for membership, and provides financial support for CWG activities.

The Board was pleased to receive this proposal from the Community Working Group, and voted to adopt the proposed changes in the Dec 5, 2018 board meeting. For more details, review the original proposal from the CWG here, as well as the official charter page which reflects the new updated charter.

Build a new community website to centralize communication and promote new opportunities

Another recommendation of the Governance Task Force that we are able to immediately act on is the recommendation to centralize communication and promote new opportunities for all aspects of the Drupal community. In particular this recommendation focuses on centralizing information about events across the globe, multilingual support, an improved home for regional groups and local associations, and community governance and support.

This recommendation aligns with one of the Drupal Association 2019 goals, which is to "Help the community follow the same path, by amplifying the voices of those who define that path." (For a little more context on our 2019 goals, check out our recent newsletter).

The task force specifically recommended a new dedicated community website, with functionality in many ways similar to an updated Groups.Drupal.org, as well as multilingual support and a strategy for coordinating community messaging and efforts. I'm pleased to report that this is an area in which the Drupal Association has already begun work. While our technical implementation will remain on Drupal.org, rather than as a separate sub-site, the proposed recommendations align closely with initiatives Association staff are working on right now.

Community Liaison Rachel Lawson has already worked with members of the community to create a new Drupal.org/Community portal. This initial change is just the first step: providing a pathway for various personas to find their way to the right part of the community to meet their interest and needs. As this is being written, we are also working on enhancements in line with the Governance Task Force recommendation: support for dedicated sections for key community bodies and providing collaboration tools similar to those that were first put in place for groups.drupal.org many years ago, but enhanced for our current needs.

Expect to hear more about these changes soon.

A glossary of key community terms, in clear, translatable language

The Drupal community has a long history as one of the largest and most closely knit communities in open source. On the whole, this has been tremendously positive, and is something for us to take great pride in, but the Governance Task Force rightly recognized a key concern that this creates: it does not scale. A lot of the language we use to describe our community, our leadership, and our governance is undefined or taken for granted. Even for longtime very engaged members there is no guarantee that our personal understandings of key community terms are shared.

Fortunately, we should be able to improve our collective understanding of what these critical terms mean. By assembling an engaged group of community members, DA staff, and existing project leaders we should be able to create an initial glossary of this key community language, and with the help of regional leaders in our global community, ensure that the language is clear and easily translatable.

If you would like to participate in this effort, you can do so in this issue.

Improving collaboration/understanding between the Drupal Association and community

This is another of the Governance Task Force recommendations that can both receive immediate action, but will also always be an ongoing process of iteration and improvement. The recommendation to improve the ways that the Drupal Association collaborates with the community, and in turn to improve the community's understanding of the Drupal Association's work, is a critical one. As the interim Executive Director at the Association and 13-year community member, this is also work very close to my heart.  

There are many steps we can take to move this recommendation forward, but a few of the ones we've taken in the last months or are planning to take in the new year include:

• Highlighting critical community efforts, and powerful community work in our social media channels.
• Encouraging the community to take advantage of programs like our Community Cultivation Grants, and in particular trying to be more proactive in reaching out to people proposing community initiatives that we strongly feel should apply (such as we did recently with Kevin Thull's Drupal Recording Initiative campaign).
• Continuing our work to expand the funding of grants and scholarships for DrupalCon, as well as our work to increase inclusivity in speaker and attendee representation at Drupal Events. (Achieving 50% representation of speakers from underrepresented groups for DrupalCon Seattle is a thrilling milestone, and a place where Drupal leads the way in the tech community).
• Coordinating with key community groups and leaders, by taking advantage of the new Drupal.org/community section we're building out to make those channels for contact and collaboration easier.
• Amplifying existing and tremendously powerful efforts of the community around the globe.

Lastly, here at the Association we can and should continue to strive toward communicating the existing ways we serve the community, many of which could help to support recommendations of the Governance Task Force. For example, when Kevin Thull recently announced the unofficial Drupal recording initiative, it had not occurred to him to consider applying for the Community Cultivation Grant program. This was eye-opening for us, because if it does not occur to even a highly engaged community member like Kevin to apply for a grant, how can we expect others to be aware of the opportunity?

By publicizing Kevin's story, and those of others who have participated in these programs, we encourage others to apply for these opportunities. The pool of funding for these programs is not unlimited, but we certainly encourage community members to apply.

Just the beginning

Acting on these first recommendations is only the beginning. In part 2 we'll address the additional recommendations of the Governance Task Force, and in particular how the Drupal Association can support these more medium and long term efforts. The work of evolving Drupal's governance will be a continuous process, and the Drupal Association is only one stakeholder in the outcome, but by working together with the community we believe we can take significant strides in this direction.